The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate
The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate
Posted Nov 17, 2014 1:46 UTC (Mon) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate by rgmoore
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate
> There's also the general point that writing configuration files as programs in a Turing-complete programming language is a gross violation of separation of policy from mechanism.
Is it?
What if your policy is algorithmic in nature, or is more complex than the designers of the config file imagined?
TCL, lua, javascript are all languages that effectively allow very sophisticated tools to be configured in very sophisticated ways.
Are they all gross violations? (I almost added PHP to the list, but that might hurt my argument....)
If your configuration language supports substitution or conditionals - or maybe even just sequencing - then you probably want to start looking at a real language, because iteration probably isn't far away.
The line between "policy" and "implementation" is very real, but it is in your mind, not in the computer. And that is where it should be enforced.